The Demand Solutions Blog

In just a couple of weeks, I’ll be joined by industry veterans Melanie French, Steve Hallsey and Marcie Williams as I moderate a panel, “A Long View on Short-term Rentals” at NAA’s Apartmentalize conference.  I’m excited to further the conversation about a subject that is top-of-mind in our industry.

I still remember four or five years ago when Jaja Jackson from AirBnB first presented to an NMHC conference. To say the reception was a bit cold would be like saying the Pope is a bit Catholic. The Q&A session was one of the most aggressive I’ve ever seen; and when I spoke up to opine that I viewed short-term rentals (STRs) as just another demand stream to be understood and leveraged, I could feel the metaphorical daggers hurled my way by the vast majority of the audience.

The legendary golfer, Jack Nicklaus is often quoted as saying, "Complacency is a continuous struggle that we all have to fight." We have frequently argued on this blog and elsewhere that the decade of growth has blunted many of the tools that have delivered success and shareholder value in our industry over the last couple of decades. Rising tides lift all boats, and when growth is all-but-guaranteed, competitive capabilities atrophy.

If - like me - you're in the business of demand optimization, you'll know that it's been getting harder and harder to talk about any trend in multifamily without first referencing the ten years of unprecedented growth that the industry has been experiencing.  For as long as anyone can remember, residents have been relatively plentiful. That's great news for operators and investors, but a growth environment can paper over cracks in sales and marketing performance.

This inescapable trend was on our minds when we embarked on a new study of lead conversion tactics.  A couple of weeks ago at the AIM Conference, we published a new white paper "Converting Leads to Leases." It is an update to a study that we had run previously in 2014 and 2017.  

The results of the first study were instructive, presenting a call-to-action for marketers and operators.  They highlighted the extent to which operators were failing to implement some of the most effective and least expensive tactics for increasing lead conversion.  We updated the data nearly three years later with an identical study, which yielded mostly similar results. The 2019 paper reproduces the methodology from those studies to report back on how the multifamily marketing has progressed in the last five years. 

Given sustained, record low unemployment in the general economy, it’s not surprising that attracting and retaining quality associates is universally regarded as one of, if not the, most challenging parts of a senior executive’s job these days. Simply put, it’s an employee’s market!

That was one of the least surprising insights from our 20 for '20 research - where we asked 20 senior multifamily executives for their perspectives on the industry outlook for the next few years.  Given the generally challenging conditions for talent acquisition and retention, we were keen to learn more about what strategies and tactics worked best for our 20 executives in this tight labor market.

As we researched 20 for '20 - our white paper on the outlook for multifamily based on 20 interviews with senior executives - we were struck by the intense competition for talent in the industry. Low unemployment rates and record industry growth have conspired to make both recruitment and retention extremely challenging.

As we get near the Apartment Innovation and Marketing (AIM) conference, I wanted to take a moment to discuss an innovation from single-family rentals (SFR) that I believe should be getting more attention from multifamily housing (MFH) operators.

This week we released our much-anticipated white paper, 20 for '20: 20 Conversations with Senior Executives About the Outlook for 2020 and Beyond. For those of you who hadn’t heard about it, we interviewed 20 operations and technology executives at the end of 2018 to get their perspectives on the state of the industry and their own priorities.

We felt that by contrasting our 20 interviewees' current priorities with priorities for the next few years, we could gain and share insight into the outlook to 2020 and beyond. We’ll be discussing some of the findings in more detail on this blog over the coming weeks. But today, aside from making sure you know it’s now available for download, I thought I would share what motivated us to put in the many hours of research and to invest in writing this white paper.

There’s an interesting debate we’ve seen start to percolate in pricing and revenue management (PRM) these days—whether to have pricing authority centralized or whether to decentralize it. From the examples we’ve seen with clients and prospects, there seem to be three approaches: 

For my New Year’s resolution, I want to focus on how to better develop associates and create environments in which they will be successful. In short, for my own company, “make it less about me,” which I can’t help but notice is also critical for our clients. The more success is based on a single leader’s energy and knowledge, the less stable that success will be—whether just for one department or for an entire company. 

So how can we make success something permanent and less dependent on us individually? It’s definitely not easy, but I think it’s clear. It rests on 3 inter-related tasks: 

Chad Greiwe is what you could call a jack of all trades. He’s the executive vice president of operations at the Gene B. Glick Company, one of the largest privately held real estate ownership, development and management firms in the country, with more than 20,000 units in 13 states. At Glick, Greiwe is responsible for strategic planning and oversight of the company’s operations vision. The Indiana native’s responsibilities in this role include the oversight of property management, maintenance, information technology, purchasing, training, financial and regulatory compliance, and marketing outreach. Before his time at Glick, Greiwe served as an advisor to the company while working with Katz, Sapper & Miller, where he specialized in serving clients in the real estate industry. Greiwe is a licensed real estate broker, a CPA and a member of both the Indiana Society of Certified Public Accountants and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. He is also an active board member at the Indiana Apartment Association and Connect2Help 211.